Like so many Australians, I am very worried by our commitment to AUKUS. I agree strongly with many other critics that we have been placed in peril by our government’s submarine agreement with the US and the UK. As John Menadue wrote on 1st April “The AUKUS alliance has forever changed Australia’s sovereignty. Foreign policy Continue reading »
Defence and Security
When a senior officer in the Australian Defence Force assumes political positions that are in the realm of the overtly political, and is not disciplined for having done so, the government is derelict in its duty to maintain the firewall between the civil and the military. Worse, it constitutes an offence against democratic theory and Continue reading »
In facing the great challenge of our time, a super-state resident in continental Asia and an itinerant naval power seeking to maintain primacy – the foreign minister was unable to nominate a single piece of strategic statecraft by Australia that would attempt a solution for both powers. Paul Keating’s response to Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s Continue reading »
Fascism is in the news again, with the nazi salute being banned. Fascism is much more insidious than a few extremist adherents. With careful rebadging it has begun to pervade some of our institutions. Fascism is a hideous ideology, think of German Nazism unleashed on Europe by Hitler and Axis allies (Mussolini, Petain) with its Continue reading »
There are many cogent arguments against AUKUS, and Pearls and Irritations has featured most of them. For me the most galling is the re-emergence of the images of the Anglosphere, and the photos of Australian Prime Ministers beaming between the US President and the UK Prime Minister, as if nothing had changed since Sir Robert Continue reading »
In a recent piece by Guardian Australia’s higher education reporter, an academic, who preferred to remain anonymous fearing institutional retribution, likened the modern Australian university to a supermarket. Students were the customers filing through the self-checkout counters; the staff, increasingly rendered irrelevant, were readily disposable. University life is becoming increasingly precarious. Casual academics continue being paid Continue reading »
The implication of AUKUS is that China constitutes a danger to Australian security. It borders on official Australian policy that China is an aggressive power bent on domination. But the history of the People’s Republic suggests its military is for defence, not aggression and that the cases where it has used external military force are Continue reading »
Instead of focusing on building bridges and finding common ground for peace, the West has increasingly sought to shore up support among its allies and castigate or demonise its enemies. The West has an unenviable track record of repeatedly failing to use diplomacy to resolve geopolitical issues The charge for peace should be led by Continue reading »
Fighting in Ukraine continues, sometimes fiercely, sometimes spasmodically. So do the unending appeals from Vladimir Zelensky for more and better weapons from the West. He is now to get from Britain anti-tank shells made from depleted uranium, which will increase radiation and chemical pollution where they are used. Depleted uranium (DU), is basically the isotope Continue reading »
Orchestrated components are coming together to enable the US to recruit Australia in future wars of choice. Our media must begin to ask questions about the crude but successful ways the Australian people are being groomed to provide passive or enthusiastic consent. A version of the long awaited Defence Strategic Review for public consumption will Continue reading »